With the advent of the Information Age, data collection and maintenance play a vital role in the operation of any enterprise regardless of the nature of its business. An enterprise may use computer application software to collect and manage data from such diverse areas as human resource management, manufacturing, planning and control, financial planning, product marketing, and customer relations. As a result, a tremendous amount of information are collected and stored in numerous diverse and often disjoint computer systems and databases. Because the physical as well as the logical linkages between pieces of data and among databases are typically inadequate to interrelate them, critical business and management decisions are often made based on an incomplete set of information.
Efforts in the industry have been made to attempt to address this problem. These include bill-of-materials, data dictionary, directory management, software configuration management systems, and some specialized decision support systems. However, conventional systems attempt to identify specific areas of enterprise information, define relationships that exist therebetween, identify ways to implement those relationships, and then implement a system to represent them. Since each application performs this task independently of the others, there is duplicated effort in building the data definitions and relations. Often the data themselves are modeled more than once by different applications. Most of these applications require trained MIS (management information system) personnel to formulate the queries for accessing desired data.
Accordingly, a need has arisen for a generic framework or information repository for shared enterprise information and data modelling. The information repository is capable of integrating all enterprise data and information and furthermore providing easy data access and navigation by non-MIS personnel.